Edgar Allan Poe: A Multidimensional Being

Edgar Allan Poe, who entered the American literary world as a poet, is a unique writer. But for a long time, he has always been treated as playing a minor role on the margin in the literary history. In the context of the post-structuralism and in the process of the cultural deconstruction of the margin to subvert the center, Poe overturns the discourses' logos of the traditional literary history with his excellent achievements and his unique styles, and establishes his new status in the literary history.The thesis, using the close-reading method of the New Criticism and focusing on the textual analysis, aims to show the colorful world and the modem narrative art of Poe's short stories.This thesis is divided into five parts.Part 1: the voice aspect. In this part, we mainly discuss the narrative point of view of Poe's novels, and make clear that, the overuse of the first person narrator embodies the awakening of the writer's subject consciousness and the self-consciousness of his writing techniques. And the use of meta-fictional devices make Poe an author of great modernity in 19 century's literary world.Part 2: structural aspect. Poe advocates the effect theory and claims to conceive the plots and characters by the predetermined effect. Most of his novels have similar features of textual structure: para-text embodies the reflective narrative function of the meta-languages and limits the narrative tendency of the text mainly by metaphor and metonymy. The appearance of foreign letters and speeches reveals the textual contemporariness feature of "intertextuality". And the climax of the narrative is also the end of the texts, which is the expected terminal of Poe's effect theory.Part 3. The stylistic aspect. The Gothic fiction has always been regarded as the most important works of Poe. It has many features such as: the gloomy mood; the protagonists with unusual personalities; the plots full of mystery and violence. Meanwhile, Poe tries to explore the aesthetic implication of the "death theme" and show the varieties of the death world. In order to reinforce the horrifying effects, the author strives to build strange images, includingred images, clock images and house images. In addition, Poe's identity as a poet endows his novels with some new qualities and the poeticized novel is his new attempt of the genre.Part 4: rhetoric aspect. There are two rhetoric variants of illocutionary narration in Poe's novels: implication and irony. The former concerns with the interior meaning under the exterior meaning, while the latter with the expressing attitude of the narrator, which makes Poe's novels attain such features as humour and comic effects.Part 5: case analysis-the modern narrative art of Poe's detective stories. In this last part, We will discuss the narrative art of his detective stories with Dupin as the central protagonist: as the forerunner of the genre, Poe creates the narrative mode of detective stories with the Dupin series, and establishes the basic paradigm of the "triangle relation" of the design of characters and plots of the "pattern novel". The Purloined Letter has become a classic work for those annotating the modern critical theories.Compared with his uncommon talents and colorful literary creation, Poe's life is gloomy. The sharp contrast between his life and art deserves more concern with the great duTerences between the individual subject and the creating subject. Poe, a forlorn genius, can never be neglected in the literary history.